Move some extension icons into the Hamburger menu

The Chromium web browser and browsers based on it such as Google Chrome are not very flexible when it comes to placing extension icons in the interface.

Extension icons are always displayed in the main toolbar of the web browser. You can right-click those icons to hide them, or use drag and drop to change the position of icons on the toolbar.

What you cannot do is move them to another toolbar, or create a folder of sorts and move some of them inside.

Google resolves the "too many icons in the toolbar" issue by limiting the available space. You can resize the space by moving the mouse cursor on the end of the address form of Chromium and either move it to the left or right to increase or decrease the space that extensions have at their disposal.

The Chromium team is testing a new feature currently in the browser that looks very similar to how Mozilla handles icons in the Australis Hamburger menu.

It replaces the right arrow icon that users need to click on to display overflow tabs with a place in the Hamburger menu instead.

What this means is that all extension icons that do not fit on the main toolbar are displayed in the Hamburger menu instead.

Here is how this looks like

As you can see, space on the toolbar is reserved for a single extension only. The two other extensions that display icons in the toolbar have been moved to the menu instead from where they can be accessed.

You can use drag and drop to order extensions, for instance by dragging one of the extensions in the menu to the toolbar.

Experimental

The feature is experimental which means that it is not clear if it will ever find its way into Chromium or Chrome natively. To use it right now, you will have to run Chromium with the --enable-extension-action-redesign parameter.

To do so on Windows, you would right-click the Chromium shortcut, select properties from the context menu, and add the paramter chrome-parameter to the target field. Make sure there is a space between chrome.exe and the parameter.

Restart Chromium and the feature is enabled in that version. It is likely that this is also working in Chrome Canary and Dev, or that it will be made available shortly.

To undo the change, delete the parameter from the target field again.

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About Martin Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand.You can follow Martin on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

Responses to Move some extension icons into the Hamburger menu

Hi Martin, There is one more action that users can do with extension icons It's possible to drag end of ominibar to the right (or left if hidden) to hide some or all extension icons on the barhttp://prntscr.com/40ciyb

I hate the hamburger SO MUCH. It's the ugliest thing in the world (oh, LINES! Maybe it's an editor!) but the worst infraction of that dumbass icon is the complete LACK of consistency between apps and websites who use the damned things. (Just saw it on Time magazine's website, AND on a new browser I'm trying for mobile -- now THAT'S crazy, to see an android browser with icons for "home", bookmarks, etc and even settings, plus a hamburger menu for no reason, framing Time Mag's website with it's own hamburger that supposedly helps you navigate the site BUT FAILS...aargh!)

I don't use Chrome, but for all the things for it to copy from Australis!!! (I dumped FF and use Pale Moon; got sick of all the updates and the resulting updates of add-ons for the updates... just, NO!). But when I WAS on FF 29, I dragged that damned burger out FIRST THING. At that time, a few releases ago now I guess (last month?), I opted to use an add-on that allowed me to customize my menu bar, and CTR, to get some functionality out of FF. That was a great extension (and too bad it doesn't work in FF ESR/Pale Moon, *or* FF 30 and up). When that bit the dust, well, so did my attempts at trying to force FF to be customizable.

Don't others see how incredibly anti-intuitive and stupid the "ux" for the hamburger really is? OMG they have it TWO TIMES on Facebook, lol! I'm half expecting hamburgers to get hamburgers WITHIN the hamburgers. Who designed that? Can someone call a name? A team? WHO did this to the internet? Whoever it is, go stand over there with Al Gore, "inventor" of the "Web". /rmde

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About Ghacks

Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.